Cracking DNA lost in adaptation
Red Joan (M, 109 mins) Directed by Trevor Nunn Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
It should have been an absolute ripper. Living legend Dame Judi Dench, in a film inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, the female spy who delivered the plans for Britain’s atomic bomb to the Soviets in the 1950s, as directed by Brit theatre legend Trevor Nunn. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, having a great story is one thing, but having a great script is another. Or to put it another way, if I told you the plot of Red Joan over a pint, you would probably think it sounded like a pretty good film. But on the screen, it’s all a bit of a leaden mess.
Writer Lindsay Shapero is known as a producer and for writing documentaries.
According to IMDB, Red Joan is her first produced movie script. Her adaptation of Jennie Rooney’s novel is a flat and pedestrian thing, with any potential for tension and surprise frittered away too early.
Red Joan is a film told in flashback. In the present day, Joan Stanley (Dench, wearing all her 84 years with pride) is hauled into the local police station to answer a lot of impertinent questions about whether she committed treason 60 years earlier. A dusty old KGB dossier suggests she did.
Expecting a masterclass from the dame in disingenuousness and duplicity, I settled into my seat and prepared to be entertained.
But all too soon, Joan has nodded at the coppers and told them it was her wot done it. And then we cut to the first in a series of long and mostly tensionless
vignettes set in the maddeningly over-familiar rooms and grounds of 1930s Cambridge, full of bright young things kitted out in tweed, faffing about and deciding to become socialists because mummy and daddy would disapprove.
Red Joan actually does have a few interesting things to say about the stark choice the Western world seemed to face in the late 1930s, between fascism and socialism, and how the socialists, unionists and students were some of the loudest advocates for fighting Hitler and not following a policy of appeasement.
However, the script’s approach to any potentially thorny or engrossing material is far too longwinded and meandering.
Meanwhile, back in the present, the unforgivably under-employed Dench is thrust into a pointless sub-story regarding her adult son – now her lawyer – and whether he will forgive her for betraying the country. It’s a poor excuse for a plot when the material contains all the essential DNA of a cracking good interview-room thriller.
Red Joan looks and sounds like a quality film.
The performances are all OK – Sophie Cookson as young Joan particularly, while Dench is fleetingly superb, of course – and the production quality is fine, in a seen-it-all-before way.
What betrays the film is a script that badly needed to be broken down and reassembled into a far leaner and nimbler form than the one presented here.
Although, to be fair, if you see fewer than the 200 films a year I’ve been averaging lately, this might not be such a problem for you.